Frequently asked questions

A private family memory keeper and kid tracker. It holds your photos, videos and notes, your calendar, your children’s health notes, school emails, lists and keepsake letters — all in one private place, and all encrypted so only your family can see it. You can run it right from your phone, no computer needed. If you’d like a permanent copy on a computer you own, there’s a free desktop app that keeps a full local archive too.

You’ll have a private account so your family’s archive is safely backed up and shared across your devices — that part uses the internet. But your phone keeps its own copy, so browsing your photos, calendar and records still works when you’re offline; new captures and newsletters send as soon as you’re back online. Either way, your data stays encrypted and private.

Install the Famileze app from the App Store, open it, and follow the short setup — a minute later your family archive is live on your phone, with no computer required. To bring in a second parent or a computer later, Settings shows a QR code for the other device to scan, which securely links it to the same private family archive.

No. Famileze runs entirely on your phone — capture, calendar, health notes, newsletters, co-parent sharing, all of it. The free desktop app is an optional add-on for families who want a copy they hold themselves: it keeps your whole archive on a computer you own, as ordinary photo and text files you can open, move, copy to an external drive or hand to anyone — your data, in your hands, with nothing locked in. It also gives your archive room to grow, since a desktop copy is limited only by your own hard drive. Nothing you capture on the phone depends on it.

A full copy of your family archive on a computer you own, kept in step automatically — and three things the phone can’t do on its own. First, it’s where you bring the rest of your life in: years of photos exported from Google Photos, Snapchat or an old hard drive, filed by date and event as they land. Second, you keep browsing all of it through Famileze — the same timeline, folders, calendar and search, just with your whole history in it rather than the recent slice your phone holds. Third, it’s permanent: everything is stored as ordinary photo and text files you can open, move or copy to an external drive yourself, so if you ever stop subscribing the archive on your computer keeps working exactly as it did — nothing is locked inside an app or a subscription. It also holds as much as your own hard drive allows, and runs the bigger jobs comfortably: bulk imports, “Back up everything” to an external drive, and fine-grained folder sharing rules. It’s free, and it doesn’t use up your co-parent seat.

No — your phones never need it on. Capturing, browsing, the calendar and newsletters all run from each phone and your family’s private cloud. The computer’s job is to bring originals home to the permanent archive, and it does that whenever Famileze is open there. One habit is enough: open Famileze on that computer about once a week. That’s when waiting originals and school emails are collected. A fortnight is the outer edge, not the target — past it the oldest waiting items have expired and the computer needs a fresh full copy instead of a quick catch-up, so once a week keeps you well clear.

On the Timeline, click “+ Capture the moment”, add a photo and/or a caption, and save. On the phone you can also record video or dictate the caption. Captioned photos are what your newsletter is built from.

On your own devices, and in your family’s private cloud — always encrypted, so only your devices hold the key to unlock it. Everything in your archive is scrambled end-to-end before it leaves, so what passes through our relay and what sits in the cloud is unreadable to us; we can’t see your photos, notes or anything else. Add the free desktop app and it keeps a full copy on your own computer as well.

Not in the same way, and it can’t be. A newsletter is ordinary email to grandparents, and an email forwarded to your family address arrives as ordinary email from outside — either way someone outside your family is at the other end, so there is no shared key to scramble it with. Incoming mail waits on the relay in readable form until your device collects it, and is deleted after 30 days at the latest; you can also limit your family address to senders you nominate. Everything else — your timeline, folders, calendar, health records, lists and letters — is encrypted end-to-end, and we can’t read any of it.

Your family address isn’t a second inbox — that’s deliberate. Only senders you’ve allowed can reach it, which is what keeps spam out, and everything that arrives is there to be filed: a date into the calendar, a recipe or a photo into its folder, a letter for the kids. Mail and its attachments are deleted automatically after 30 days — file what matters and let the rest go. Replies to your newsletter arrive here too, so close family can comment or add a letter you can keep.

No. There is no cloud AI and no general language model anywhere in Famileze. The app uses small tools that run on your own machine, so your family’s photos, notes and emails are never sent away to be “processed”. One thing does leave: if you dictate with the 🎙 button on the iPhone, iOS uses Apple’s speech recognition and may send that audio to Apple to turn into text. Type instead if you would rather it didn’t — and desktop dictation runs entirely on your own computer.

Correct. You approve every filing, every calendar change, and every send before it happens. Emails you forward in sit in the Inbox until you choose what to keep. Newsletters are never sent until you press send.

It happens on its own: your family’s archive is backed up to your private cloud, encrypted, the moment you capture anything — so a lost or replaced phone never means lost memories. Install Famileze on a new iPhone signed into the same Apple ID and it finds your family again by itself — there is no password to remember, because there is no password. Two things that follow from that, and we’d rather say them than let you assume: it works through the App Store app with iCloud Keychain turned on, so keep iCloud Keychain on; and if your cloud storage is full, the newest full-size photos wait on your phone until there is room, so clear space or add storage rather than leaving them there. For a copy you hold in your own hands, install the free desktop app — it keeps a full local archive on your computer as ordinary files any computer can read (that’s your export too, no lock-in), and “Back up everything” copies the lot to an external drive. And before you delete photos from any other service, always confirm they’ve landed in Famileze first.

Anything you mark private (the 🔒 lock) is kept to you — it is never shared with a co-parent. Your own phone still sees it, because your phone is treated as your own device. Everything else is “shared” and visible to a paired co-parent.

In Settings, create a pairing code and give it to the other parent — they enter it to join the same family from their own phone (or computer). They then see everything marked “shared”, while your private (locked) items stay yours alone.

You, as the subscriber, are the admin, and the admin can delete anything. Your co-parent shares the day-to-day in full: the calendar, lists and to-dos are theirs to add to, change and clear. Photos, videos and folders are different — they can remove one they added themselves in the last 24 hours, and after that only you can. It is deliberate. An archive that either parent can empty in a bad week isn’t an archive, and this is your children’s childhood.

Their devices stop receiving anything new within a few minutes. From that moment they can’t add to your archive, delete from it, send a newsletter from it, or read mail arriving at your family address. What is already on their own device stays with them — on a computer it’s ordinary photo and text files, and neither you nor we have any way to reach in and take those back. They can go on to start their own Famileze and bring what they hold into it, or start fresh. Either way your archive is safe and untouched, and nothing you add afterwards is shared with them. If things change later you can invite them back and send them the archive as it stands then.

Open Newsletter, pick a month (and optionally a child) and press Generate — it lays out your captioned photo moments. Edit the captions if you like, choose your recipients, then “Email to recipients”, Save PDF, or Share. You can also schedule it to send later — it goes out on time even while your phone is asleep.

No. Family recipients can read the newsletter but cannot edit anything — you control what goes out. Comments they reply with come back to your Inbox, and you decide whether to keep them.

No — and it never will. Health records and reads back only: doses you’ve logged, growth, immunisations, appointments and sickness notes. It never tells you what or how much to give. Always follow the packet or ask a doctor or pharmacist.

Your phone syncs through your family’s private cloud, so make sure it’s online, then reopen the app (or pull to refresh). Videos take a little longer to appear because they’re reassembled first — they show instantly under “Just sent from this phone” in the meantime. (If you also use the desktop app, keep it open and online so its changes reach your phone too.)

Open Settings and tap “Clear all data & disconnect”, then sign back in (or scan the pairing QR again, if you use the desktop app). This clears only the wedged copy on this phone — your family’s archive is safe in your private cloud and downloads again fresh; nothing else is affected. If the phone is stuck on an old day but otherwise fine, try Settings → 🔗 Reconnect this phone first: it re-pairs without clearing your un-sent photos.

Your forwarding address follows your current family automatically. Open Inbox → Email settings to see the address that’s active now, and press “Check mail” to fetch anything you’ve forwarded.

Two switches have to be on. First, in Famileze on your computer: Settings → 🔔 Notifications — master switch on, the category on, and quiet hours not covering right now. Second, on the Mac itself: System Settings → Notifications → Famileze → “Allow Notifications”. The very first banner an app ever shows comes with an Allow / Don’t Allow question from macOS — if that’s never answered, macOS silently hides every banner after it, even though Famileze is sending them. Banners only appear while Famileze is in the background; inside the app the same update shows as a small 🔔 message instead. “Send test notification” on the Settings card checks the whole chain.

A$6.99 a month, or A$49.99 a year — one subscription for the whole family, on every device. Your first month is free. The subscription covers your family’s private cloud: the storage that backs up your archive, keeps your devices in sync and sends your newsletters, with 50 GB included. Prices are in Australian dollars; outside Australia the App Store charges you in your own currency at Apple’s equivalent price, with any local tax included. After the trial you’re billed in advance and can cancel anytime — the time you’ve already paid for runs to its end. Your memories are never held hostage: your phone keeps its own copy (as does the free desktop app, if you use it), and capturing new moments keeps working.

Anytime. Your subscription is handled by Apple: iPhone Settings → your name → Subscriptions, where you can cancel or change plan — the free desktop app never charges you. Cancelling keeps the service until the end of the period you’ve paid for. After that, everything your phone holds stays yours and keeps working — your calendar, health records, lists, letters, recipes, captions and dates are all on the phone itself. Your photos need one sentence more, because we won’t pretend otherwise: to make room, your phone lets go of an original once it is safely in your private cloud and keeps a high-quality copy instead, so for older photos the full-size original is the one in the cloud. We keep those for about six weeks after a subscription ends, and the app shows your family’s date. After it your photographs stay with us at up to 1600 pixels, with every caption, date and folder, for as long as we run Famileze — but your videos are not kept at all, so those are the ones to bring home first. Install the free desktop app before then and every original comes home to your computer, permanently and at full quality. If you use the desktop app already, it is all on your computer now and nothing changes.

Email support@famileze.app — in the app, the “Email the developers” button (in the FAQ & Privacy screen and in Settings) opens a message pre-filled with your app version and platform so we can help faster, and nothing personal about your family is ever attached.